Accelerated charged particles, for example electrons and protons, are used for a multitude of technical, scientific and medical purposes. The generation of such particles using particle sources and the acceleration thereof using particle accelerators is known.
Particle sources often generate continuous beams of charged particles. Some particle accelerators, for example RF linear accelerators, are not suitable for accelerating continuous particle beams. Therefore, it is necessary for the particle beams to be bunched by means of a bunching device (buncher), i.e. to subdivide these beams into discrete particle bunches.
The prior art, for example of U.S. Pat. No. 5,719,478, has disclosed various bunching devices for bunching continuous particle beams. However, these known devices are disadvantageous in that they result in non-ideal bunching in the case of small beam currents, in which a space charge distribution does not influence the bunching process.